Socially-Aware Network Design Games

In many scenarios network design is not enforced by a central authority, but arises from the interactions of several self-interested agents. This is the case of the Internet, where connectivity is due to Autonomous Systems' choices, but also of overlay networks, where each user client can decide the set of connections to establish. Recent works have used game theory, and in particular the concept of Nash Equilibrium, to characterize stable networks created by a set of selfish agents. The majority of these works assume that users are completely non-cooperative, leading, in most cases, to inefficient equilibria. To improve efficiency, in this paper we propose two novel socially-aware network design games. In the first game we incorporate a socially-aware component in the users' utility functions, while in the second game we use additionally a Stackelberg (leader-follower) approach, where a leader (e.g., the network administrator) architects the desired network buying an appropriate subset of network's links, driving in this way the users to overall efficient Nash equilibria. We provide bounds on the Price of Anarchy and other efficiency measures, and study the performance of the proposed schemes in several network scenarios, including realistic topologies where players build an overlay on top of real Internet Service Provider networks. Numerical results demonstrate that (1) introducing some incentives to make users more socially-aware is an effective solution to achieve stable and efficient networks in a distributed way, and (2) the proposed Stackelberg approach permits to achieve dramatic performance improvements, designing almost always the socially optimal network

Familiars: social gaming with PASION

The PASION (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks) project is designed to research social presence technologies and their effect on individual and group behaviour within mediated collaborative environments. A mobile multiplayer social game called Familiars is being designed, where the success and rank of a player within the game is directly linked to the qualities of the player's in-game social network. By examining the structures of the game-wide social network generated through playing the game, the aim is to identify patterns in the interactions which can be used to direct further studies and build future versions of the game that will enhance the game experience, bringing more of the face-to-face social value to technologically mediated games and hence mediated collaborations in general

Improving social game engagement on Facebook through enhanced socio-contextual information

In this paper we describe the results of a controlled study of a social game, Magpies, which was built on the Facebook Online Social Network (OSN) and enhanced with contextual social information in the form of a variety of social network indices. Through comparison with a concurrent control trial using an identical game without the enhanced social information, it was shown that the additional contextual data increased the frequency of social activity between players engaged in the game. Despite this increase in activity, there was little increase in growth of the player-base when compared to the control condition. These findings corroborate previous work that showed how socio-contextual enhancement can increase performance on task-driven games, whilst also suggesting that it can increase activity and engagement when provided as context for non task-driven game environments

What Do We Expect from Our Friends?

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient be- liefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocators demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.dictator games, beliefs, baseline altruism, directed altruism, social networks

What Do We Expect from Our Friends?

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator’s demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.dictator games, beliefs, baseline altruism, directed altruism, social networks